The project in summary
Art-Therapy sessions for migrant, refugee and asylum seeker children, youths, and adults, located inside the Reception Centers in Andalucía and Greece.
The overall goal of the Art Therapy project is to increase the resilience of the people with a migration background. More specifically, this intervention aims to:
- help people with a migration background to recover from their traumatic experiences, build resilience, regain self-esteem, and integrate into the community;
- leave lasting impact by training local care providers and enable them to implement basic arts therapy techniques in their own practice;
- offer caregivers, exposed to fatigue and secondary trauma through their work, a new and innovative tool to modulate/reduce stress and increase their Self-Care;
- in the long term, integrate the practice of art therapy in the protection and humanitarian assistance programs implemented in migration contexts in Andalucía and Greece.
Beneficiaries (2020-2023)
The project reached a total of 322 migrants and refugees (including 100 Ukrainian refugee minors and adults), of which:
- 161 children and adolescents (4-17 ages);
- 161 adults, of which 83 young adults (18-25 ages) and 78 adults (+25);
- 24 caregivers of The Spanish Red Cross.
Between February 2020 and September 2023, The Red Pencil (Europe) in collaboration with The Spanish Red Cross, with Alta Mane support, developed the following activities:
- organized and ran 299 group art-therapy sessions for 161 refugee and migrant children (4-17 ages), 83 young adults (18-25 ages), and 78 adults (25+), located inside the Reception Centers and Independent Living Houses managed by The Spanish Red Cross in Málaga (Spain);
- activated the Arts-Based Capacity Building Training (ACBT) program focused primarily in using Art Therapy as a tool for Staff’s self-care and modulation of stress at work and intended to provide partner staff with new tools using Arts Therapy for enriching their interventions with asylum seekers and refugees, and organized 12 training sessions for 24 caregivers of The Spanish Red Cross;
- in collaboration with The Spanish Red Cross, has conducted a pre-post evaluation process, to check on progress on the young beneficiaries and make appropriate recommendations for future program planning, as well as the exploratory study “Art Therapy Intervention addressing migratory grief and resilience for teenagers asylum seekers in the context of COVID sanitary crisis”;
- conducted the research study, “Adult refugees’ perspectives on mechanisms of change after resilience-based art therapy intervention: a mixed method pilot study”, as a part of a Master’s Degree in Art Therapy at the University of Applied Sciences in Nijmegen (The Netherlands).
In 2024/2025, intends to consolidate art therapy interventions in Málaga, inside the Reception Centers run by the Spanish Red Cross, and in parallel to continue the research study on MoCs (Mechanisms of Change) in order to modelize an evidence-based type of intervention as well as to develop a training and intervention protocol to replicate art therapy interventions in other migration emergency contexts in Andalucía (Granada, Sevilla, and Antequera), and in Greece, inside the Refugee Sites of Schisto (Athens) and Korinthos (Korinthos), in collaboration with El Sistema Greece.
